Getty Instagram Grant Winners Document the Drama of the Everyday

From teen moms to slices of street life

When’s the last time your Instagram obsession made you $10,000? As the social photo sharing platform’s numbers keep rising—its photos generate 4.2 billion likes per day—so do the stakes for photographers hoping their work gets recognized. And Getty Images and Instagram recently did just that, awarding three photographers a $10,000 grant and a chance to display their work in public.

The grant is the second ever given under the collaborative program, which was designed to support photographers telling the stories of underrepresented communities. This year’s recipients hail from around the world—and the stories they tell go into the lives of everything from the lives of pregnant teens to the ravages of environmental destruction.

Christian Rodríguez, a photographer from Uruguay, won for a photo project called Teen Mom that shows what it’s like to be a pregnant teen in Latin America. Rodríguez, a documentary photographer, took on the project to highlight how data shows that Latin America could soon lead the world in teenage pregnancies, he writes on his website. He followed the daily lives and graphic births of young moms, many of whom are living in poverty and uncertain life circumstances. “It can be very difficult for girls,” he told NPR’s Malaka Gharib, “but I want to portray them with the dignity and courage they have.”

A photo posted by The End (@whatdoestheendoftimelooklike) on Apr 21, 2016 at 4:12pm PDT

Ronny Sen, a photographer from India, won for turning his lens toward a different kind of challenge—that faced by people contending with the nearly post-apocalyptic landscape of a place that has been on fire for over a century. The coalfields of Jharia, India, have been burning continuously since 1916, and despite attempts to study and put out their fires over the years, they’ve never been extinguished. His project, What Does the End of Time Look Like, produced unforgettable images of the environmental and personal devastation wrought by the fires. “The end of time is manifested with shards and fragments; random, scattered elements of human existence, and a community without a future—plunderers of coal who move from site to site with blasting mines,” Sen writes.

A photo posted by Instagram (@instagram) on Sep 20, 2016 at 1:59pm PDT

Girma Berta, an Ethiopian photographer who lives in Addis Ababa, documents daily life on the streets of his hometown with his iPhone. His series Moving Shadows stitches cutout photographs of Addis Ababa’s everyday people onto colorful backgrounds, Addis Insight explains. The result is a fascinating, detailed slice that highlights tiny, but important, portions of the Ethiopian capital’s cacophonous urban life.

About Erin Blakemore

Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based journalist. Her work has appeared in publications like The Washington Post, TIME, mental_floss, Popular Science and JSTOR Daily. Learn more at erinblakemore.com.